Yeti President Chris Conroy on Mountain Biking’s Biggest Local Brand

Golden, Colorado-based Yeti Cycles has always had a strong local identity, but its impact is felt throughout the cycling world. Following the launch of its game-changing Switch Infinity shock in 2014, the company has been growing so fast that the brand is looking for more factory space, yet again.

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We caught up with Yeti President Chris Conroy just after he returned from the Second Annual Yeti International Tribe Gathering in Chile to talk about what drives the brand. (Find your cycling tribe with our handy field guide!)

BICYCLING: What has been Yeti’s secret to success?Chris Conroy: Across the company, we’re riders first, then best-in-class professionally. As a smaller company, we’re only as strong as our weakest link, so we hire motivated, like-minded individuals. We know that if we measure our staff against the staff of any other company in the industry, we’re competitive with product, brand, expertise, and on the bike. The laid-back vibe at Yeti is super important to all of us, but we’re a high functioning, high expectations organization. …We want to ride the best bikes, which drives us to make the best bikes.

See the Yeti team in action:

We’re also grounded in community. We’re extremely competitive, but we never want to come off as brand that’s elitist or unattainable. At the end of the day, the business is driven by bike riders making cool high-end stuff. And anyone who wants to ride our bikes is welcomed as part of our tribe.

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What’s your barometer for knowing you’re on the right track? It can be a little bit of a slugging match to get product out the door; we have lots of super-opinionated people here. When we come up with a design internally, it goes to racers, then we modify it and ultimately we come out with a product. That gauntlet can take years.

The staff is constantly asking questions and pushing. Does it meet our expectations? Is it meeting the market’s expectations? With the Yeti SB5.5, we wondered, ‘Is this too much bike for a lot of people?’ But the staff were massive fans, so we went for it. It took customers a little while to understand, but now it’s our best-selling bike. Sometime you have to be on the front edge and hope the market comes around.

Racing is at the heart of Yeti. Have you grown your team along with production? Racing is a cornerstone of our product development. If you are successful on the circuit, you have great product and the right athletes. There is a harsh honesty that we love about racing that holds us to a high standard.

We want to have the best athletes in the sport, and we recognize that they need support as they’re getting started, not just later in their career when they’re already established and everyone wants them. Regional and national racing builds our athlete base, and the sport.

So how do we find the next guy? We go to the f*cking races! And when we find someone who looks promising, we send them to ride with our World Champion guys. Then Ritchie [Rude] and Cody [Kelly] tell us which guys can flip the switch and win regardless of whether they’re sick, or hurt, or the conditions are tough. Those are the future world champs, and those are the guys we want on our team.

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You’ve been on the board of IMBA since 2011, and you recently became Chair of the Board. What do you hope to achieve? IMBA had a change at the top, and Dave Wiens was hired as Executive Director. I am a huge fan of Wiens—he is a f*cking legend. He has had his hands dirty. He has been building trail and advocating for trails since back in the day. I was instantly intrigued and wanted to support him. We want IMBA to be very mountain bike-centric. It’s an organization run by mountain bikers for mountain bikers. I stepped into the chair role to help refocus that vision and to support Wiens.

What does it mean to be the biggest local brand? It starts at the top, with the recognition of who we are. It sounds super simple, like marketing 101. But that’s us. We’re grounded in who we are as a brand, and there isn’t anything that tugs us away from that. You won’t see Yeti road bikes coming out anytime soon. We focus on what we love, what we know, because that’s where we excel. And we’re good neighbors. We’re friends with other local brands. We appreciate having competitors at races and at demos. The bike community is something we need to grow so Yeti can grow. We need everyone to be part of that so that we can all be successful.

Is there a legacy you hope to leave? I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about myself. I guess I’d be okay with my legacy being “he was a good guy who liked to ride his bike and drink beer.” But, seriously, the legacy we all should leave is to have worked hard, have given back, to have tried to make things better whatever we do in life. For me it’s mountain biking. For others it could be anything. Figure out what you believe in and do that. It becomes your legacy through deeds not words.

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